What to Look for in an AI SEO Tool Before You Trust Its Results

Why this matters more than it seems

AI visibility is a new enough category that almost nobody has settled definitions. When a tool tells you "ChatGPT recommends you 40% of the time" or gives you a score out of 100, it's worth asking a simple question: how did they get that number, and does the method actually make sense.

Some of these tools are doing careful, repeatable checks. Some are running one query once and presenting it as a trend. Some are guessing based on your website's SEO signals and calling that "AI visibility." The gap between these approaches is huge, and it's not always obvious from the outside which one you're looking at.

This isn't about naming names or picking a winner. It's about giving you a short list of things to check before you hand over money or make decisions based on a report.

Ask how the score is actually generated

The first thing to understand is whether a tool is asking real AI models real questions, or whether it's inferring visibility from traditional SEO data and presenting that as an AI score.

These are different things. Traditional SEO signals (backlinks, keyword rankings, domain authority) influence how AI models learn about the world in a general sense, but they don't reliably predict whether a specific model will mention your business when someone asks for a recommendation right now. The only real way to know that is to ask the models directly, with the kind of question a real customer would type.

If a tool can't clearly explain what prompts it used, which AI models it checked, and how many times, be skeptical of the number it gives you. A score that can't be explained in one or two plain sentences is usually a score you shouldn't act on.

Check whether it tests multiple models, not just one

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity don't behave identically. They're trained differently, they pull from different sources, and they don't always agree on who to recommend for the same query. A business can show up reliably in one and be invisible in another.

A tool that only checks a single model is giving you a partial picture and calling it the whole thing. At minimum, look for a tool that tests across the major assistants people actually use to ask for recommendations, and that shows you the differences rather than averaging them into one vague number.

Be wary of tools that promise things no one can actually promise

Nobody, including Belcher, can guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend your business by a certain date. AI models are updated by their makers on their own schedule, using training and retrieval processes that outside companies don't control and can't fully predict. Anyone claiming they can guarantee a ranking, a mention, or a specific timeline is telling you something they can't back up.

What a legitimate tool can do is check your current visibility honestly, point out concrete gaps on your own website (missing schema markup, a thin or absent meta description, unclear headings, slow load times) and give you specific content to fix those gaps. That's a real, bounded claim. It's also, not coincidentally, what Belcher does: it reads your site for these basic signals, asks AI models direct recommendation-style questions to see if you come up, and generates schema, FAQ, and meta snippet fixes you can paste in yourself.

Notice what's missing from that list. Belcher doesn't scrape Reddit threads or social media to guess what people are saying about you, and it doesn't claim to monitor every mention of your business across the internet. If a tool tells you it's tracking your reputation across every platform in real time, ask exactly how, and ask to see the raw output, not just the summary.

Look for tools that show you the raw answer, not just a grade

A score is easy to produce and easy to misuse. What's harder to fake is the actual transcript: the exact question asked, and the exact answer the AI model gave. If a tool lets you see that raw exchange, you can judge for yourself whether the result is meaningful. If it only shows you a letter grade or a percentage with no underlying detail, you're being asked to trust a black box.

Before you commit to any AI visibility tool, ask to see one real example, start to finish. If the company is confident in its method, showing you the raw answer should be easy. If it's reluctant, that tells you something too.